The Walkable Radiant

Era lanes

Three lanes, dimmest to brightest — Rao's Dusk, Day and Dawn. Lightness is the era; position confirms it.

• MM Modernity — dusk
• DM Divergence — day
• LM Liveness — dawn

Life-bars

• gestation, then alive — vivid
• spent — ghosted after its close
• no declared end — dashed past now
• unborn machines are absent from the map entirely
• bar thickness = gravitational weight

Tension phase

Four steps, each with its own dash, weight and glyph — never hue alone.

• latent — diamond, dotted
• loading — triangle, dashed
• rupturing — cross, solid heavy
• resolved — open circle, solid light

A tension against a counterparty that has no card yet is drawn as a notch standing on the bar. A tension whose machines are not both alive at the scrub year has already been settled by history — it is still drawn, but it recedes.

Couplings & horizons

• intra-era coupling
• cross-era coupling — beaded, brighter
• ledger entry, published
• ledger entry, vaulted — hollow, sealed

Couplings are drawn only for the machine under the cursor or selected — the whole set at once is noise, not a map.

The time scale is warped

1200–2400 is not drawn to a constant year-per-pixel. Density follows the corpus: the centuries around the present are given room, the deep past is compressed. Tick spacing on the axis shows the warp — read distances as ordering, never as duration.

Keys: ← → step, ⇧+arrow leap, Home/End ends, Esc clears the selection and any constellation link. Or type a year above.

Deep links & the horizon

• unsurveyed — years past the corpus's generation date; the prophecy zone. Never cropped: ledger pins and horizons stay full-strength here.
• emergence candidate — a dated claim from the ledger, not a surveyed machine. Dashed if sealed, dotted if read off a brief's window. It appears only once the walk reaches its year, and runs open-ended when the seal names no closing year.
• constellation link — machines bound by an ontological path (e.g. from a prophecy). Named ones glow; the rest of the map dims.
• Copy view link in the masthead puts the year, selection and layers into the URL — paste it anywhere to reopen this exact view.

The populated future

Past the survey the map is all claim, and every mark in it is hollow or dashed. Nothing below is a record of anything.

• window — a candidate whose seal names a closing year is drawn between the two: it may arrive anywhere inside, and the map claims nothing past the shut mark. Its name sits over the window.
• formation arc — formed_on: what this claim is said to stand on. It reaches out of the surveyed map when the parent is a real machine, and along the chain when the parent is another claim. An arc appears only once the walk reaches the claim at its head, so walking forward grows the chains root to leaf. Select any node to light its whole ancestry and everything downstream. Chains in the masthead turns the layer off.
• predicted end — a living machine's tail stops where the ledger says it stops. Solid is the record, the first dash is "no declared end", the sparser dash after the bracket is the claimed window, and the glyph is the manner of ending.
• sublimation — dissolves into what carried it zombie — form outlives function succession — something inherits rupture — it breaks, nothing inherits
• The ?? lane divides into sub-lanes by the domain each seal declares — tech, politics, economy, ecology, culture — because a candidate's era is exactly what is not yet known. Rows inside a sub-lane are packed, so read vertical position as room-making, never as rank.
• predicted and closing in the readout count arrivals reached and end-windows opened at this year — the prophecy lane is a long way down a full map, and the counts sit where the year already is.